James King

This is the best explanation of gerrymandering you will ever see By simplifying gerrymandering we see how problematic it really is.

A decade after it was written, I find myself pulling out the @cingraham.bsky.social's gerrymandering explanation to help people understand why California’s Prop. 50 is so important to pass.

wapo.st/3WfcjeB

YouTube video by Tantacrul How We're Redesigning Audacity For The Future

Enjoyed this video from @tantacrul.bsky.social about the design and engineering of the new version of Audacity (open source audio software). Beautifully explained and produced. This link is to the last section, but whole video is great. youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38?...

Side note: I really hope Aaron Sorkin and the writers of Silicon Valley are sharpening their pencils. There is so much material here.

Google: The AI Company | Acquired Podcast The complete podcast (and transcript!) of Google and Alphabet’s AI history and business strategy.

Latest episode of Acquired is great! It’s a recent history of Google’s successes and failures on AI, but covers most of the main players like OpenAI, Anthropic and others along the way. It’s 4 hours long, like all good podcasts should be. www.acquired.fm/episodes/goo...

Yesterday @aubreyclayton.bsky.social delivered a talk for the Ergodicity Economics seminar series. Aubrey shows how it is possible to derive the equations of probability without linking them to frequencies. A video of the talk is here: ergodicityeconomics.com/2025/10/01/6...

Hacking proteins with AI

New episode of HARD DRUGS!

AlphaFold, ProteinMPNN & other AI tools are transforming biology and drug design.

But how do they work? What can’t they do? And can we use them to make a vaccine against Strep A for the very first time?

In this episode, Jacob and I talk about hacking proteins with AI.

Just spotted that this was shared in the @observablehq.com newsletter. Nice!

I'm helping to organise this seminar series. The next seminar will be given by Aubrey Clayton, the author of Bernoulli's Fallacy. Come and join us: ergodicityeconomics.com/event/semina...

Observable Notebook Kit & Desktop 1.4 now support TypeScript cells, along with TypeScript for Node.js data loader cells. (Just type stripping, but greatly helps interoperability.)

Great!

New episode of my Audiolog: audiolog.jamesking.io/2025-09-10/

New blog post: jamesking.io/2025/09/10/i...

Thank you for such an amazing set of tools.

Observable Notebooks 2.0 in Fora Health — Screen Studio Observable Notebooks 2.0 in Fora Health — Created and shared with Screen Studio

Big fan of @observablehq.com and since their preview release of Observable Notebooks 2.0 my team at Fora Health have integrated Notebook Kit into our app. Works really well so far. Quick demo ⬇️

screen.studio/share/TqvyfFbU

New blog post: Failing to reproduce Axelrod, 1980

Today I learned that a foundational result in game theory hasn’t been successfully reproduced, and not from lack of trying.

jamesking.io/2025/09/02/f...

This thread is a really good short summary/review of the Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies.

You can add more than 1 to a prompt and use them as inline references. That’s really nice.

Oh wow! That’s really useful! Thanks for the tip

Notebooks 2.0 is here! 📓🔮 Previewing today:
Notebook Kit, an open file format for notebooks with open-source tooling for generating static sites; and
Observable Desktop, a macOS desktop application for editing notebooks as local files, with a radical new approach to AI. observablehq.com/notebooks/2/

Beautiful cover!

The ergodicity solution of the cooperation puzzle | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences When two entities cooperate by sharing resources, one relinquishes something of value to the other. This apparent altruism is frequently observed in nature. Why? Classical treatments assume circumstan...

From the same issue, this article is one of my favourites: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

It’s the Aquired podcast format applied to drug discovery. That’s a very good thing.

YouTube video by Lab Muffin Beauty Science Does retinol in skincare even work?

Excellent video on whether retinol is a scam — there are only few low quality RCTs, why would one still believe in it? — and it’s so good, talking about various incentives and the role of mechanistic knowledge. I’ll have to think about how to fit this into teaching!>
m.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Z5...

A philosopher's view of the long road from RCTs to effectiveness For evidence-based practice and policy, randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are the current gold standard. But exactly why? We know that RCTs do not, without a series of strong assumptions, warrant pr...

Really great video! Thanks for sharing. Reminded me of Nancy Cartwright’s argument that RCTs shouldn’t be the only way we find out what works. www.thelancet.com/journals/a/a...

@mmtpodcast.bsky.social your intro to MMT at the start of the latest episode was excellent. Such a good distillation. 👏

Stephanie Kelton on the Disastrous Republican Economic Agenda "We don't have two years. You won't be able to pick up the pieces."

An interview with @stephaniekelton.bsky.social about DOGE, Trump, crypto, tariffs, inflation, the collapse of the rule of law, and more.

"We don't have two years" to wait for Democrats to rally, she says. "You won't be able to pick up the pieces."

www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/stephanie-...